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that quote is so true and very profound. We must first believe that there is a force greater than us and second allow it to do what we can not do for ourselves, and that is work from within, for our power is limited.

A soothing saave for my anxious heart

Oh Ladies,

Just reading through these posts still keeps streams of tears coming down my face (you know that ugly cry where you're eyes turn inside out)??

I thank God that Suze had the strength, the courage and most of all.....the commitment to keep this "baby" going and growing. I'm reading such an interested book written by Marianne Williamson,
"Miracles in Mid-Life"....so far, so good

For so many years, I tied my self-worth with my productivity in this world. Since losing my job - I've been able to look back and truly accept now that my lupus has reached that stage where I can no longer work. Coming to terms with that, brought peace. Now, it's the "waking season" of my "human being" journey that I was to explore. Our culture is so profoundly "instant" in so many aspects....and I've had the opportunity to slow down and understand...I never learned how to be at peace with my present situation in life. Because I was too busy disecting it trying to figure "what I did wrong".....when in the last few months I began to understand that God's love is like a "chip" implanted into us, genetically. We have the capability to have peace; I think that when peace becomes paramount in your heart....it will come.

Okay it's past midnight, I'm rumbling....more later. Oh, it feels so good to be back home!!!

Much love,
Browneyedgirl

"I believe that friends are quiet angels who lift us to our feet when our wings have trouble remembering how to fly." - unknown

Browneyedgirl;
My minister once told me that, at some point in our lives, many of us will reach the "dark night of our souls". It is at this time that we seek the road to higher consciousness. When she explained it to me, it was like a door to a whole new me had been opened and I understood what I had gone through and why. Here is what she explained to me:

We often pass through the dark night of our souls while seeking this higher consciousness. The dark night is said to occur after a lengthy and profound absence of light and hope. In the dark night you feel profoundly alone. You have gone through many significant phases in your life, as you progress toward higher consciousness. Your faith is strong. You may have experienced indications of the reality of higher consciousness and yearn to be more deeply in communion with it. You see the principles of a higher power at work in your life. Yet, all in all, you find yourself somehow lonely, in pain and you fee as if you are on the outside. You feel caught between your old way of living, your old tendencies and associations, and this nebulous, unreachable realm of higher consciousness.

You feel an exile in both places. You don’t belong in the old pastimes. in the old empty or numbing way of life, yet you somehow can’t fit in or feel at home in the higher consciousness and its reality. You only stretch like a human mule after a receding corncob while pulling the heavy weight of your old tendencies behind you. You try to be good, but due to life and circumstance, you often can't be good. You try to be loving and find at times your heart is hard like stone. Sometimes, it seems as if your life and your work and projects that you attempt seem to fall down around your ears. You persist because you can’t conceive of going back to your old way of life. That seems impossible now, something’s not working. You don’t know what it is, but something is awry.

You come to realize and recognize that your own higher self, out of love, is lifting you up into its embrace. You are being drawn into your dark night because your inner potential has great stature, and your old ego requires you go through the dark night in order to be transformed. Your night is a very difficult time. While others may one day envy you for the marvelous growth you experienced in such a short, intensified period, you will, because of the pain of your experience, always feel profound compassion for those whom you one day see going through a similar night.

In your loneliness, you next — in a seemingly random process — notice that none of your thoughts have proven adequate to your suffering. Not one — even repeated fifty thousand times — breaks the inner storm and lets in light. Higher consciousness seem so far away that perhaps they are unreal. Neither one has, despite your protracted exposure of yourself, done anything to ease or remove your agony. Nothing works. You feel as if there is nowhere to turn. There is nothing to be done. All actions you considered have been tried. There is nothing to think, nothing to feel, nothing to do, nowhere to go. It seems that you have to either accept this defeat — or, you can persist in struggling against it. For awhile longer, you go about thinking, feeling, and doing other options that occur to you. But you realize, in the midnight of your soul, that you have tried every option you know of.

Then, it happens. A holy presence seems to surround you — sweetly, softly. You feel it filling you. Your mind is filled with mellow or bright light. Your heart is permeated with peace. This peace moves through your body like a cold spring of mountain water. It flows in your spine, your brain, and under your skin. This Peace Is Everywhere.

Also, with this peace, there is comfort, it moves like a breeze across your mind and your heart. Then, or a few days later, the fire of joy begins to smoulder. Here, abiding with nothing more to do, your ego drops away! Your fearful sense of self falls away from you. You stand in the light — a new being, a free being — transformed!

Basically, that’s what the dark night is all about: transformation. Your ego, your limited sense of self, your inadequate complex of ideas about who you are had to be dissolved. Your ego sense was so powerful — you invested it with so much of your thought and feeling — that your attitudes of life become based on an egocentric perspective. The ego gains a progressively greater foothold on your entire life because your basic attitudes about your existence and essential nature are strongly linked with ego.

Here in this dark night, the lifelong ego sense dies: impotent. Having fulfilled its part, now weak and incompetent, it is dissolved — transmuted. From a higher sense, now awakening within you, you slough off your false sense of self. You now know yourself to be a different person than you thought you were.You, in passing successfully through the dark night, enter the realms of higher consciousness. You’ve been cleansed of the most deep-rooted sickness: your ignorance of your true nature and your inadequate, often totally wrong opinion of who you are. You now cease your inner conflict and abide serenely in your true nature. The night is over. The dawn of a new life in higher consciousness transforms your sad or unhappy life of the past few months into one with a heavenly nature.

Henceforth, you will walk the earth seeing others afresh, living a new life, and abiding in your true nature. You have become a son or daughter of higher consciousness. Now your words and actions will be attuned with your true self. Now you express inspiration and comfort.